


Warming Her Pearls

by sandandsalt



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2012-08-10
Packaged: 2017-11-11 20:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandandsalt/pseuds/sandandsalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows Her Ladyship’s body the way she knows a dress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Warming Her Pearls

**Author's Note:**

> Done for the DA Kink Meme. Prompted by Carol Ann Duffy's poem of the same name.

She knows Her Ladyship’s body the way she knows a dress.  
  
She only touches Her Ladyship along her seams, the places where lace and satin stretch over skin, run up against bone.  Barely touches. Her fingers hover in the space between inhale and exhale, too quick, too light to be felt. Hummingbird wings dress Her Ladyship in the morning, slip her arms through the holes and pull the thread through the loops, stitch it shut. (There is an intermediate period, before for the final hook is set and a constellation of pins are mapped out in Her Ladyship’s hair, where Lady Grantham is not quite a lady. Plain and nude in the mirror, Lady Grantham is just a woman, just a woman. Her hands will pull at the threads; Lady Grantham, at times, is just another creation.) She knows Her Ladyship’s body the way she knows a dress. Here are the tears and holes, the worn spaces and the places that have needed repairs. Here are the scars, the landscapes she has woven shut and patches she has made along her veins (and the places she has, stupidly, angrily, accidentally torn open). Her Ladyship is as much a creation as the dresses she pulls over her ribs.  
  
Her Ladyship never feels her hands.  
  
*  
  
Her own dresses are all black, stiff high collars, fabric not meant to shine beneath high chandeliers and between the hands of lords. Heavy, unyielding stuff, suffocating like armour. It’s the sort of dress made for hiding, secrets and whispered strands of gossip. She’s always been good with them, stringing them together and carrying them close, waiting. Information, truth or lie, is the only weapon a house ever gives its servants. She has only her tongue to take what the world says she doesn’t deserve. They line up china vases catching sunbeams with open mouths and artefacts in porcelain and gold. Nothing they care for, no. The lords and ladies are all too buried in it. They forget how to see it; it fades into the background. She runs a hand over them sometimes. All the gifts she was never meant to have. She was born into the wrong sort of family, a poor sort of family, never destined to have her own life, only create someone else’s. There’s a moment, sometimes, when her fingers clench white and she wants to grab the statue or vase or sculpture by the neck and throttle it, smash it into a thousand pieces. She lets go. She’s not a thief and she’s not a killer. It’s not who she is. Not who she was born to be. Never who she was born to be.  
  
So she keeps the secrets close, close, closer until she can feel them moving through her lungs, until it’s all she breathes, all she can taste on her tongue. The promise of power is almost as sweet as true authority. The prospect of holding something in her hands, of owning something, anything of value almost as good as its weight would be in her palms.  
  
She hides something else beneath that rigid, black mountain-peak collar, too.  
  
”They used to do this in New York. My mother used to,” the countess had muttered, placing the narrow box in her hands. Sarah can hear the slur of vowels, the areas where America has been scrubbed out, replaced with soft English sounds. (Not her sort of English, though, never her sort. For all its wisdom, her tongue will always give her away: poor and meaningless. However sharp, a servant is a servant to the core.) Her Ladyship is just another creation.  
  
They sit like anchors around her neck. She hates them at first, thinks them like a dog’s leash. They feel wrong. She was not given any of Her Ladyship’s grace, no elegance to carry them proudly. So they are worn as though they are just another secret (maybe they are), buried beneath her dark armour of a dress. Sometimes, her hand will drift up, touch the small beads when there is no mirror to catch any slip of bone-white shine. They must look so wrong on her.  
  
(The logic, too, is flawed, she thinks. All the more reason to keep it a secret. What would they think? The necklace draped around her neck is nothing short of a backwards concept. Surely they’d think her too cold to ever give warmth to anyone, anything, even a set of stones.)  
  
Her hands shake, sometimes, in the morning when she locks them ‘round her neck, the pressure of them, their value, gliding through her fingers like water.   
  
But she never wants them (strangled or smashed or whole). She never wishes for it to be hers.  
  
*  
  
In the evening, Her Ladyship will take them from her.  
  
It’s the only time the countess ever touches her.  
  
Not carefully, not hesitantly, but full of the too-sweet thoughtlessness, carelessness she has come to know in Her Ladyship. Her fingers are so cold, her skin more ice than pulse and beat. Her Ladyship touches her and she feels, for a moment, warm. Her fingerprints prick at her throat, lift the necklace up. It lies, for a second, for a minute, for an eternity, between the countess’ too-wide smile and her own mouth, lips thin and drawn tight. She wills herself to be stone, to be cold and void and empty (all the warmth is in the pearls, everything she has). But something inside her always lurches, the anchor tugged away and pulling her to Her Ladyship like a planet in orbit, spiralling dizzily around, just out of reach.  
  
The feeling sickens her.  
  
*  
  
After dinner, the pearls are the last thing she removes. Sometimes, she doesn’t remove them at all.  
  
Sometimes she shuts the door behind her and listens. There are shadows under the door, whispered terms that are not quite secrets. She knows Her Ladyship’s body better than her own, and she knows, she just knows, here, His Lordship’s hand is pressing – present and firm and steady – against her thigh. Here, the other one running up her side.  
  
(Does she wear the pearls when he touches her? Or are they discarded? Does it mean a thing either way?)  
  
She takes a step away from the door, away from the shadows into space, dark and empty and consuming.  
  
She orbits, never touches, never meets.  
  
(Does she mean a thing, either way?)  
  


*

  
In her room, she removes her dress. Hands flutter around her neck, seeking but not finding and she curses herself for longing, curses herself for feeling the weight of nothing more heavily than the force of anything at all.  
  
Once, Her Ladyship had held a scarf around her neck, said, “It smells like you.” But in this room all she can smell is the afterthought of French perfume, the residue of Her Ladyship’s skin – not her, nothing of her. She wraps the blankets around her chest, wonders if she has a feeling (touch, taste, smell) at all.  
  
The memory of Her Ladyship’s fingers at her throat burns a ring around her neck.  
  
She feels, at least.  
  
Perhaps that is enough.  
  
*  
  
In the end, it’s all she’ll ever have.


End file.
